writer & YA author

Motherhood and writing.

Some days here in this house is my whole world, and others I am itchy to be part of something outside these four encroaching walls. There’s a constant tug between this small person who is blossoming with every minute of nurturing and play, and a tiny voice inside my head reminding me ‘I’m a person with needs too’. I want to be and do everything with her, but I want to model what a woman following her goals looks like too.

Before I was pregnant, I would look ahead to new motherhood and imagine that it would be my whole life in these early years. I have always wanted children, and I have always wanted to be in a position to stay at home fulltime with my kids. I thought I’d put my writing career to the side, and perhaps step back into it when my children were old enough to go to school. Maybe I thought that way because at the time I was a student and then a journalist and I didn’t LOVE it, or maybe it was because my mum was such an inspiring stay-at-home-mother I wanted to try and emulate that.

I started writing the manuscript for my first book Please Don’t Hug Me because at the time it felt like it was something I couldn’t not write, and not long after that I got pregnant. It was embarrassment of riches really, finding the thing I wanted to do career-wise at the same time as fulfilling a lifelong wish. I’d hoped to be able to finish my manuscript before baby arrived and enjoy the best of both worlds, but then I went on to have hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) for the entire pregnancy. I was in bed vomiting all day every day. It was incredibly demoralizing to spend long days and even longer nights stuck in bed not even able to look at a screen or a book because it made me nauseous. I was cut off from the people in my life and things were fairly grim. My growing stomach was a reminder that my state wasn’t permanent though. I could look ahead. Looking ahead felt like all I could do. When HG took away the thing I wanted to do so desperately, it fueled my desire to make that dream come true more than I thought I could want it.

And then, oh baby. In the first months of new life I detoured into another dimension. One filled with in-the-moment moments and mindfulness thrust upon me. ‘One day at a time’. There was joy unparalleled; she slept and all searching left my body. The tiredness demanded a deeper word than tired. It took root in my bones, but I was unencumbered somehow.

Around about one year in I started to come up for air. Things are the same, but we’re underwater, or on the moon. I tried to carve out an hour a day of my own, and when that fell away, an hour a week. It remains a battle for the time, the space, and the reason. Why write, when there is food to prepare, washing to be done and a child who would be happy back inside the womb some days, it feels? Why write, when friends are strangers, and I’ve forgotten what a meal tastes like warm? Why write, when my sentences trail off before I finish a thought; what good could come of those words? It feels meaningless and never so important as now.

I write so little but like what I see. More importantly I like what I feel. There is calm and rhythm. The slow beating of a drum. May she knows what this feels like someday. Without the padding of time it’s bone on bone. I write less but it’s better. Or if not better than truer.

At first I was rusted, but the want was there. I was a dog chasing its ball over a cliff. I kept at it, buoyed by every mother who has been before; she is the sea. Agnes’ first birthday was the line in the sand and when I reached it, my book came back out of that bottom drawer. I edited in every nap time and spare minute. I buffed and polished the piece of my heart I’d laid down on paper and timidly took it out into the world. It found it’s place, and for that I am so thankful. I’m still working on the balance, sometimes feeling like I’m failing at both, but excited about what lies ahead.

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3 thoughts on “Motherhood and writing.”

Love this, Kay. I remember some of these feelings so vividly it hurts. I’ve got no advice on finding balance, except that I found that there was no balance. And that was ok (I liked Brooke McAlary’s advice re ’tilting’ instead.) And it felt good and validating to read about other writer/mother experiences – there’s so much wonderful stuff and you might have already read, but I remember especially Kate Fige’s LIFE AFTER BIRTH, Susan Johnson’s A BETTER WOMAN, MOTHERHOOD & CREATIVITY: THE DIVIDED HEART edited by Rachel Power and this cracker essay http://velamag.com/mother-writer-monster-maid/ by Rufi Thorpe.
Best of luck with the writing, the mothering and your book going out into the world x

Thank you so much for the kind words and the recommendations! There honestly isn’t anything better to hear than ‘been there’ or ‘I know how you feel’. I love Vela, I’m going to check that piece out now